JB Doubtless over at Fraters is sounding off about punk rock with his characteristic subtlety:

People like to pretend that punk is about rebellion and challenging authority. It reality, it’s just a nihilistic ethos premised on self-destruction, emptiness, and most of all failure. The worst thing you can do in the world of punk is succeed. In that way it shares an affinity with gangsta rap culture which derides success in school as “acting white,” while punk derides success in anything as “selling out.” How dare you do well!

To be fair, “Against Me!” is, by all indications, your typical post-Henry-Rollins American punk band (yaaawwwwwn). Still, when JB quotes the Strib reviewer Chris Riemenschneider…:

Gabel became the Angry Young Man of future Against Me! fame around age 12, when he moved to Naples, Fla. A coastal town where many wealthy retirees go to soak up the sun and tax breaks (including many Minnesotans), Naples “is absolutely oppressive to youth,” he said.

…and replies…:

It also tells me a lot about Gabel that he would describe spending his formative years in an “oppressive” environment. Part of being punk (and a big part of its appeal) means never having to grow up.

I can see JB standing with a shotgun on his porch, telling those damn kids to get off his lawn.

UPDATE: My bad – I see the piece was written by Chad the Elder. The tone and approach seemed so…JBish. My bad.

On the one hand, I’ll chalk it up to Chad having had, perhaps, one of his brother’s patented hangover-bomb holiday cocktails.

On the other – Chris Riemenschneider is not a good music critic. I see lines like this:

At once bleeding-hearted but mostly apolitical, and apathetic but hopeful…

…and I’m drawn back to this bit of work:

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Which one is parody? Does it matter anymore?

On Against Me!, I must remain apathetically, albeit not angrily, ignorant.